(Credits: Far Out / Eddie Janssens / wikiportret.nl)
Thu 26 March 2026 20:00, UK
The entire rock and roll genre looked a lot different through the eyes of David Crosby.
Many people would have been glad to play straight ahead rock for the rest of their lives if they reached the level of fame that he did with The Byrds, but as soon as he started Crosby, Stills and Nash, he saw it as an opportunity to start stretching his musical palette out and start incorporating pieces of his influences that wouldn’t have fit his old outfit. He wanted the opportunity to move in different directions, but there were bound to be a few guitarists who could take their music to far greater places than he could.
Because if there’s one thing that Crosby knew, it was how to be humbled by the greatest musicians that he came across. He already had his mind lit on fire when seeing free jazz for the first time, so when he heard someone like Bob Dylan beating people up with every single song that he made, he began to realise that music could mean a lot more than a bunch of notes on a page. It was about someone telling their story, and no one did that better than Joni Mitchell.
When you break down everything that Crosby was looking for in his favourite musicians, Mitchell has all of them hands down. Her words are pure poetry, and the different tunings that she employed were a lot stranger than what anyone else was doing, but that didn’t matter to Crosby. It was a thing of beauty just to hear her performing all of her tunes, but it was about to get a lot more interesting when he heard what the greatest jazz pop musicians were doing on the charts.
The fusion boom was just on the horison when the 1970s began, and in only a few years, Mitchell would be using song craftsmen like Jaco Pastorius and Larry Carlton on her records, but if Crosby was ever going to give his seal of approval, it was always going to be from someone that could throw down on both acoustic and electric guitar whenever they picked one up.
And when you hear what Michael Hedges could do, you’d think that no one else could have played that precise. It’s not only about the fact that he could make the guitar cry, but the note choices that he would use were everything that Crosby had been looking for, especially when he helped see his creativity up close and personal when working on his posthumous album Torched years later.
Crosby’s strong suit may have been in creating lush vocals, but he felt that Hedges deserved a spot next to Mitchell as one of the great titans of his field, saying, “You’ve got to remember I learned [different tunings] from people who were better than me—Joni Mitchell and Michael Hedges, in particular. Hedges was the master. I think he was the best guitar player of the last century. He and Joni both explored tunings more than anyone.”
But the most important thing that Hedges did was open Crosby’s mind to what could be done on guitar. His genre had a lot more to do with world music than anything else, and when you hear the abnormal pieces of his discography, all of them seemed to be in the service of trying to make music that no one would have given the time of day to if they had only listened to typical pop music.
Because like Crosby, Hedges was in search of sounds that could excite people even if they weren’t necessarily what their ears were accustomed to. And while Crosby went outside the box years before Hedges was making his masterpieces, he could do his best to help champion what he could do on some of his classics.
